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Climate cosmopolitics and the possibilities for urban planning Authors Donna Houston (Department Geography and Planning, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia) Diana MacCallum (Department of Planning and Geography, Curtin University, Perth, Australia) Wendy Steele (Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT, Melbourne) Jason Byrne (Environment, Planning and Architecture, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia). Corresponding author donna.houston@mq.edu.au Publication Details Paper accepted for a special issue of Nature + Culture ‘Beyond Utopia, Crisis, Values and the Socialities of Nature’

Abstract Cosmopolitical action in the climate-changed city represents different knowledges and practices that may seem disconnected but which constellate to frame stories and spaces of the climate-just city. The question this paper asks is: how might we as planners identify and develop counter-hegemonic praxes that enable us to re-imagine our experience of, and responses to, climate change? To explore this question, we draw on Isabelle Stengers’ (2010) idea of cosmopolitics – where diverse stories, perspectives, experiences and practices can connect to create grounding for new strategic possibilities. Our paper is empirically informed by conversations with actors from three Australian cities (Sydney, Brisbane and Perth) who are mobilising different approaches to this ideal in various grassroots actions on climate change.

Key words: Climate change, urban planning, cosmopolitics, Australia

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Climate cosmopolitics and the possibilities for urban planning

Introduction

Climate change sometimes figures as a site in which long-standing debates are re-enacted and sometimes as a problem the scale and character of which calls for really new ways of thinking. Meanwhile, climate change policy proceeds on the basis of an extraordinarily limited understanding of the social world and is, for the most part, untouched by theoretical debate of any kind at all. Elizabeth Shove 2010, p.278

Climate change is a messy policy issue in Australia. At the Federal level, the need

to act has been accepted only relatively recently, and a fragile national agenda for

mitigation and adaptation is slowly emerging. State and, especially, local

governments have to various extents been developing their own approaches to the

problem since the 1990s, often with help from international sources such as the

International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (Bulkeley 2001; Betsill and

Bulkeley 2006; Gupta 2010). In spite of this fragmentation, there seems to be

remarkable consistency between the published climate responses of different

governments, including those promulgated through urban planning strategies.

Almost all seem to draw on similarly neoliberal forms of governance, which

propagate methods of risk management that collapse uneven geographies and

ecosocial complexity into benchmarks and technical fixes (Rogers 2013). Recent

enquiries suggest that very few approaches, if any, pay serious attention to social

implications of climate change, including its potential impacts on equity, culture,

democratic governance or multispecies relations (Byrne et al. 2009; MacCallum et

al. 2011; Rice 2010).

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We are intrigued by this gap and its application within contemporary Australian

urban planning knowledge and practice. We contend that current responses to

climate change in Australian planning strategy represent a failure in material

imagination: where the discursive segregation of social and ecological concerns

from the environmental/economic imperatives of the climate change crisis impede

action toward sustainable and just urban futures. We also contend that normative

dimensions of urban climate change policy can only have limited purchase in

grasping present eco-geo-social realities in contemporary cities.

Previously, we have argued for the need for an engaged, robust and material

understanding of urban climate justice in planning that recognises: (i) that climate

change is a crisis of society as well as environment, wherein the impacts are felt

most by the most marginalised sectors of society (both human and non-human) –

not only at the global scale, but at within cities and suburbs as well; (ii) that society,

economy and nature are all, simultaneously, mutually and constantly, reconfigured

by the ways that urban relations are played out; and (iii) that as a result we must

better take into account the complex links between human society and the natural

environment, currently locked into processes that remain hardwired to spatial,

temporal and economic models of growth that are not equitable, not eco-sensitive –

and not substantively oriented towards transitioning to low-carbon futures (Steele et

al. 2012). Our discussion here further considers how urban planners might identify

and develop counter-hegemonic discourses and praxes that enable us to re-imagine

our experience of, and responses to climate change, in ways that support

multispecies justice in the climate-changed city (Lorimer 2012).

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In this paper, we contend that “cosmopolitics” (Stengers 2010) is a materially

imaginative exercise that moves beyond the technical and institutional “fixes” of

climate change policy and strategy in Australian cities. Isabelle Stengers (2010)

argues that cosmopolitics are constellations of diverse inhabitations – where human

and nonhuman stories, relations, politics and practices can connect to destabilise

the hegemony of technocratic responses to climate change. This paper explores the

possibilities of cosmopolitics as a means for urban planning to rethink its “ethics of

connection” (Rose and Robin 2004). Rethinking “ethics of connection” in urban

planning draw on insights from the environmental humanities as well as recent

social science research focused on material and creative practices of sustainable

and just urban transitions (see Rose at al 2012; Gabrys 2013; Broto and Bulkeley

2013). We argue that exploring seemingly disparate types of community work

around climate change highlights the spaces, places and practices whereby people

reshape urban boundaries and connections in novel and surprising ways (Steele et

al 2013). We conclude with the argument that planning systems need to take

cosmopolitical constellations seriously if they to engage with the collective task of

putting cities “together differently” in a climate-changed world (Gibson and Head

2012).

Cosmopolitics: a different ethical-political imagination for urban planning

A common world is not something we come to recognize, as though it had always been here (and we had not until now noticed it). A common world, if there is going to be one, is something we will have to build, tooth and nail, together. Bruno Latour 2010, p. 455

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The apparent domination of technical and neoliberal climate change policy might be

seen as a realisation of what Shove (2010) calls the “mirror” of climate change – the

tendency for urban researchers, policy makers, and planners to look at the

“problem” of climate change and see their own values reflected back at them. In

policy arenas we tend still to see a discipline, and disciplinary objectives, shaped by

scientific norms, by a faith in technological progress and by universal conceptions of

the public and the public good. In urban policy cycles, these normative

epistemologies and/or goals underpin the formation of measurable standards that

are used to govern and manage responses to extreme events and climate change in

cities (Rogers 2013). Rogers (2013, p. 384) cautions that these unacknowledged

normative dimensions of climate change policy can form “rigidity traps” that are built

in to responses to urban climate change. “Rigidity traps” are contradictory policy

formations, which make climate change adaption visible and intelligible to neoliberal

policy and governance, while potentially increasing community vulnerability to

climate change because they are not responsive to contingent local conditions or

what falls through the gaps. The neoliberal fixation on standards and benchmarks

in urban governance, for Rogers, is particularly worrying because of the tendency of

measurable outcomes to become static: while fluid and relational factors based on

other forms of interconnected knowledge and practice (for example, cultural

memory, local experience, environmental and multispecies justice, bio-regional and

geological imaginations) are ignored.

“Rigidity traps” in urban climate and disaster resilience policy legitimate that of which

they speak. Four decades of social critique in urban and planning theory have

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emphasized the contingency, contentiousness and fragility of norms and social

goods. Yet, when we imagine what planning looks like in the climate-changed city

there appears to be disconnects between theories of contingency and practices of

certainty. In theory, we accept “ontological pluralism” - that the world is understood

and experienced differently by different social actors (Howitt and Suchet-Pearson

2003) and we understand that technology and knowledge are constructed in and

mediated by practices that are themselves contingent. But in practice, we are often

mired in performances of accountability that impede the development of

substantively different urban policy. As the eco-social semiotician Jay Lemke (1993,

p. 271) reminds us: “wherever there are meanings enabled there are also

necessarily meanings disabled”. Thus, when certain ways of speaking come to

dominate public discourse, alternative voices are silenced, and alternative pathways

become unimaginable.

Material and political life in the climate-changed city requires approaches to policy

and practice that draw primarily upon recognizing and embracing connectivities as

opposed to simply fixating around certainty. We argue that cosmopolitics can help

urban planners to imagine what this looks like –and it is this re-imagining that is key.

The idea of cosmopolitics that we are working with in this paper is inspired by

Isabelle Stengers (2005, 2010) whose work on this theme questions Western

scientific orderings and practices and which draws inspiration from attentiveness to

generous political entanglements with the cosmos which is unknown and which

cannot be brought into account through generalized procedures of the common

good.. Cosmopolitics, thus, represent a way of thinking and doing that destabilises

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fixed notions of both the world (cosmos) and the political (Latour 2004). In

challenging the privileged position of science in our repertoire of knowledge making,

it extends the site of “politics” beyond a limited citizenry or polis, to include all actors

– citizen, non-citizen; human, non-human; conscious, non-conscious – in the

cosmos. At the same time, it honours the intangible – experiences, emotions,

relationships, beliefs, practices – as essential moments of the “real”, making the

cosmos itself an object of continuous political negotiation between actors.

Cosmopolitics support “ecologies of practices”, in which science, technique and

technologies interact with other equally valid and important modes and products of

action in ways that matter, in ways that shape the future (Stengers 2010).

Cosmopolitics, as Stengers imagines them, thus represent modes of disentangling

politics from “postpolitical” consensus (2005). Cosmopolitics resist the legitimization

of consensual knowledge that offer “protections” to universalising ways of seeing

and doing and which affirm the status quo in the name of emergency (2005). For

Stengers, cosmopolitics is an invocation to “think in the presence of” – as this

profoundly reshapes the questions we ask of the present in ways that leave “no-one

unaffected” (Stengers 2005, p. 1002). To “think in the presence of” distinguishes

between working with “detached” knowledge and working with “relevant” knowledge

– so it does not reject science or policy but it does call into question they actually do

as a means of developing practical, situational politics in emergent and unknowable

conditions. In this sense, Stengers argues, that cosmopolitics prompts “us to

consider this world with other questions, to disregard watchwords that present it as

‘approximately normal’” (2005, p. 998).

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Stengers’ cosmopolitics are different to cosmopolitanism (Beck 2006) and

cosmopolis (Sandercock 1993, 2003), which are two concepts that are more familiar

to urban planning theory. Cosmopolitanism is often evoked by urban scholars to

represent democratic values and practices that celebrate mobility and diversity, but

it has been problematized for its privileging of uncritical notions of “common

grounds” (dissolving borders, overcoming barriers as global citizens) as the way

forward (cf. Our Common Future, the Brundtland report WCED 1987). Such ideals

often limit capacities to politically recognise or redress the “banal geographical evils”

and persistent injustices of global capitalism and uneven development (Harvey

2000). Similarly, the search for common space in cosmopolitan thinking also

produces “failing universalisms” because they privilege Western ontological

perspectives on what it means to be human in the world (Di Chiro 2008; Blok 2011).

Both critiques of cosmopolitanism call for greater attention to be placed on the

politics of who benefits from cosmopolitan ideals and the ways they can foreclose on

sustainable and just alternative futures (Blok 2011).

Conversely, Cosmopolis promoted by Leonie Sandercock (1998; 2003), is a

cosmopolitan utopia in which difference and mutual interdependence are the basis

for societal norms, in which communities of difference are given space to define and

articulate their own needs, and in which traditional, rationalistic modes of planning

are supplanted by more fragmented, communicative, creative and openly principled

practices. These norms make explicit the need for a cosmopolitanism that

addresses the problems noted above, and have provided fertile grounds for

theorizing the possibilities of urban encounter by being attentive to the basic

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eccentricities of urban life: it strangeness, differences and connections (Fincher and

Jacobs 1998).

This understanding of cosmopolis as representing hybrid “mongrel” politics open to

contingencies, differences and uncertainties is much closer to the cosmopolitics

imagined by Latour and Stengers. Yet, as Gill Valentine (2008, 324) observes:

“Much of the writing that is associated with what might be regarded as a

“cosmopolitan turn” in thinking about the city celebrates the potential for the forging

of new hybrid cultures and ways of living together with difference but without actually

spelling out how this is being, or might be achieved in practice.” Moreover,

cosmopolitical writing around cities has tended to enact a kind of human-centred

closure around the polis.

In sum, cosmopolitical theory has been utilised by planners (and planning scholars)

within city contexts to promote socially diverse, liveable urban spaces. However,

there has been far less emphasis on the cosmopolitics inspired by Stengers, which

consider how we “live together” in cities with other species and other inhuman geo-

physical agents (Clark, 2010; Steele and Vizel 2013). Urban planning systems,

along with other “expert designs” of capital, science and the state have ignored and

undermined the heterogeneous ecologies of cities and our political responsibilities

toward them (Hinchcliffe et al 2006, p. 124). Urban cosmopolitics thus compel us to

enlarge our understandings of urban encounter, civic culture, liveability, survivability

and justice to encompass “more-than-human” relations as a “cause for thinking”

(Stengers 2005, p.1002).

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Climate cosmopolitics as alternative urbanisms

The ecological genius of cities remains a vast, largely hidden power. Mike Davis (2010, p. 43)

Cities are multinatural places, but strategic planning processes often work against

ecological connectivities because they are fundamentally driven by practices that

divide and demarcate particular land uses from each other, define social and

political borders between communities, and privilege capital growth as the force that

sustains urban life (Steele et al 2013; Lorimer 2012). But in an era of climate

change and economic uncertainty, the stability and viability of decisions that

facilitate short-term economic growth over longer-term ecological and socio-

economic viability have been called into question. Cosmopolitical projects in the

climate-changed city are not just about planning for a future that is impossible to

predict, nor about including “stakeholders” in processes that may or may not engage

them. Rather, they call to our attention how unlike practices – of policymaking,

everyday life, and ecological interactions – continuously impinge upon each other.

Cosmopolitics in the climate-changed city do not disavow the politics of urban place-

making – but they do transform them into something that is less concerned with final

solutions, less inclined to reproduce “rigidity traps” through established techniques

and technologies (Rogers 2013, Gabrys 2013). In what follows, we present a small

taste of the community work that is going on in our home cities in Australia. These

projects are not unusual in the world but when they are brought into cosmopolitical

proximity they represent collective efforts to bear witness to the effects of climate

change, to (re)imagine its meanings, to decouple urban experiences from

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hegemonic discourses and practices, and to enact different urban and multispecies

possibilities.

(i) Sydney: Synurbic species and witnessing climate change

In the climate-changed city, multispecies relationships can become all the more

fraught as environmental pressures in rural and regional areas (fire, drought, land

clearing) means that other species are becoming increasingly dependent on urban

areas for survival. In Sydney, the Australian White Ibis (Threskiornis molucca) is a

native species that has become increasingly prevalent in urban areas over the past

three decades (from several breeding pairs reportedly released by Toronga Zoo in

the 1970s to a population of approximately 7000 birds). The Ibis might be an

example of what Francis and Chadwick (2011) call “synurbic species” – species that

are increasingly associated with urbanization, and which are in turn changing

behaviour (nesting, foraging, breeding) and biology in complex and unpredictable

ways. Although they are protected under the National Parks and Wildlife Act (1974),

Ibis are not universally loved birds in Sydney. For many people, the Ibis are

considered pests because they are associated with rubbish and landfills (which

contain readily available sources of fast food) and because they are highly social

birds that tend to congregate in large colonies that are noisy and smelly. Ibis also

pose a strike risk when they nest in marshlands near the Sydney international and

domestic airports.

Ibis have a range of up to 25km a day and do not distinguish between boundaries of

private and public property, so their nesting and foraging behaviour pose a particular

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challenge for urban and environmental planners. In Sydney, several local

government areas have produced Ibis Management Plans that demonstrate a range

of responses and strategies. For the most part, the Ibis are treated as an

“overabundant” problem that can be managed through habitat modification, the

removal of nesting material and food sources, the removal of nests and eggs, noise

deterrence and in some instances through culling and shooting (Management Plan

for Australian White Ibis in the Bankstown Local Government Area 2004). While Ibis

are highly visible birds in Sydney’s urban spaces, their ubiquitousness also masks

the fact that little is known about their urban ecology and their future survival

trajectories on a continental scale (Martin et al 2012). The massive decline of Ibis in

their traditional inland breeding areas means that their futures are increasingly

entangled in urban decision making processes and it means that places like urban

landfills and weedy marshlands have become “incidental wildernesses” crucial to

sustaining Ibis populations.

The urban governance of wildlife is broadly concerned with multiscaled

connectivities – but in practice – different levels of government often produce

contradictory narratives, practices and visions of how different species are managed

within the city. For example, at the local government level Ibis management is

connected to local land-use issues and conflicts, so the boundary placed around

them is often an act of containment (managing populations, destroying nests,

dispersing birds to other wetlands locations, etc.) or defined by spatial boundaries

between local government areas, public and private property, etc. The management

of Ibis at the local level is rarely seen as an indicator of environmental change

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occurring at bioregional or continental scales, nor do such approaches readily

recognise that managing Ibis populations in situ might be contributing to the Ibis’

overall decline. This is particularly evident in the focus on nesting and breeding

sites in local Ibis management plans – where the destruction Ibis places within the

city ignores the fidelity that the birds have towards particular places and assumes

that mobile avian fauna has the capacity to “move-on” even as the pressures of

urban development and wetland loss mean that that there might not be anywhere

else to go. Such practices also assume the Ibis as incapable of “storying” their own

multispecies places in the city and render them meaningful (van Dooren and Rose

2012).

In 2006 the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change (now the Office

of Environment & Heritage) produced a booklet called “Wild About Ibis: Living with

Urban Wildlife”, which made explicit the connections between urban Ibis, behaviour

and ecology, and the health and integrity of wetlands in inland areas. The “Wild

About Ibis” booklet was intended for a wider public audience than the Ibis

management plans produced for local governments, but it nonetheless interrupts

certain ways of seeing and practicing Ibis management in the city. In particular, the

“Wild About Ibis” booklet emphasised the cultural and ecological significance of

Australian wetland birds and their ability to adapt to harsh environments. The

booklet also noted a significant decline in Ibis observed in their traditional breeding

sites in Lake Macquarie – noting that urban areas are critical for nurturing current

breeding populations.

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What is often missing from efforts to understand Ibis in contemporary Australian

urban governance and planning imaginaries is precisely an exercise of “thinking in

the presence of” outlined by Stengers (2005). “Thinking in the presence of”

incorporates science, urban planning and wildlife management issues – but this is

not a one-way street where the Ibis simply become objects of urban governance.

Thinking in the presence of the Ibis, highlights a set of political and ecological

responsibilities involved in witnessing climate change and the slippery slope of

many Australian species towards extinction, but it is an invocation to situate the city

and the ways in which is governed in “ecological terms” (Plumwood 1993).

“Thinking in the presence of” is therefore not the same as “thinking like” – though

such exercises in enlarged thinking are useful for framing more-than-human

interactions with what many consider a pest species. Rather the cosmopolitical goal

is articulate how the Ibis are “climate witnesses” and how their future trajectory is

entangled in complex regional political ecologies that call into account the

technologies, techniques and practices that impinge upon their survival.

The point of cosmopolitical approaches is to explore how scientific research works in

conjunction with other forms of knowledge and activities that make it possible for

other forms of connections to emerge (Whatmore and Landström 2011; Gabrys

2013). In this sense, Ibis are climate witnesses but are also witnessed by

individuals and the groups who care for them. Since 2003 local community

members throughout urban and regional NSW have participated in the Ibis

Community Survey – a citizen science project organised by NSW Environment &

Heritage to better understand these broader connectivities and consequences.

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Citizen science projects is a useful tool for urban planning because it can yield

accurate observational data across temporal and geographical scales – as ordinary

people are able to observe Ibis in everyday and often hard-to-reach places and log

this information onto an online survey. Citizen science is also an educational

practice, which brings the scientific techniques of Ibis management into public view

and with it different possibilities for understanding the ecological city.

Indeed, the Ibis survey draws attention to the role of citizen science as one type of

cosmopolitical constellation, where people draw on observations of a range of

climate change proxies: recording (in various modes) weather patterns; telling

stories and chatting about the weather; preparing for drought or flood; documenting

field observations of ecological indicator species; replacing water-hungry gardens

with “water-wise” ones, raising frogs, watering urban birds and supporting urban

wildlife and species migrations. Citizen science projects are an increasingly

important tool in wildlife conservation because non-expert citizens can collect high-

quality data and observations from hard to reach places (such as suburban back

gardens); but they remain an under-utilized tool for understanding climate-change in

urban planning contexts.

(ii) Brisbane: Re-imagining food sovereignty

Seasonal and everyday multinatural relationships in the city involving human and

non-human are also realised through connections to food and livelihood providing

new insights for how planning could be done differently in a climate-changed city.

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In Brisbane (Qld) a number of different re-imaginings are currently being enacted at

the grass-roots level around the notion of food - not as some futuristic climate

change agenda - but as a series of creative ways of re-thinking food sovereignty

firmly planted [sic] in the here and now. For example within the inner-city Brisbane

suburb of West End a number of alternative grassroots food-related projects exist

proffering quite a different set of ideals to mainstream hegemonic ones. This is

expressed through a range of diverse activities that seek to address issues of food

access, choice, creation, supply, diversity and management. These include:

• A small volunteer co-operative of local residents who offer - for free -

local food tours of the West End area highlighting the fruits, herbs

and other delicious edibles that are available (depending on the

season) throughout the suburb as a means of expanding community

food knowledge and networks.

• A West End activist collective has taken steps to go around and

harvest ripened fruit from local trees (avocados, oranges, mangoes,

passionfruit, bananas etc.) - making them freely available to all -

rather than seeing the fruit rot on the tree or the ground as an explicit

protest against food waste.

• Individual activists regularly engage in ‘dumpster diving’ to retrieve

some of the vast quantities of food that is thrown out on a daily basis

by large companies in compliance with health and other regulations,

but that are still edible and able to be used in creative ways.

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• Guerrilla plantings occur on sidewalks as a way of reclaiming public

space for fruit, vegetables, flowers and other food producing and

community purposes.

These diverse stories and practices work as cosmopolitical projects to destabilise

the way issues of food are understood and practiced, disrupting in particular the

conventional top-down, technocratic and managerial approaches to nutritious and

affordable food. In Australia this has emerged through government initiatives such

as the National Food Plan (NFP), which emphasizes a corporate approach to food

aimed at the ‘big end of town’.

Rather than accepting this national food proposal, activist organisations in Brisbane

and across Australia have united to develop the ‘Peoples Food Plan’. Their

collective agenda is ‘visionary and transformative change’ that builds towards

“establishing a more coherent and cohesive food justice / fair food movement

around the country” rather than “a business-as-usual plan to suit the needs of big

agri-business, major retailers and commodity exporters” (Australian Food

Sovereignty Alliance 2012, p.1).

(iii) Perth: Ecoburbia, an exercise in resilience

We contend that cosmopolitical practices help to disturb many of the conventional

boundaries between economic, social and environmental action. In Perth (WA), for

example Ecoburbia is an enterprise that is both a business and a community,

oriented to building resilience and creating sites for cooperation and learning at both

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the neighbourhood and metropolitan scales. The mainstay of the business side is

that its owners, Shani and Tim, run regular training sessions for Perth’s “Living

Smart” program, an initiative to help (mostly) householders to adopt goals and

actions for a sustainable lifestyle.1 However, as an independent company with a

large social and professional network, they can also be quickly responsive to ad hoc

opportunities as they arise – hosting a small conference with an international guest,

facilitating local distribution of solar panels and engaging in community education.

Of particular interest is the work going on at Hulbert St Fremantle, where Shani and

Tim live. Shani describes Hulbert St as an ‘unintentional community’, the outcome

of various decisions of its residents to live in a certain way or, in their case, to

develop a property up the street from their home, which serendipitously led to their

getting to know all their neighbours. Here are some of the things that Ecoburbia

does here, tacitly but mostly not formally supported by the local government2:

1 Living Smart was created in 2003 as a fairly informal partnership between Murdoch University, the City of Fremantle, the Meeting Place community centre (Fremantle) and the Southern Metropolitan Regional Council. In 2011 it became an independently incorporated not-for-profit organisation. ‘Graduates’ of the Living Smart training may join the ‘Living Smarties’ network; members regularly meet to share concerns, goal setting and skills, from energy-efficient construction to water purification, financial management, permaculture, food processing, making household and personal hygiene products, sewing, etc. They can be found on the web at: http://ecoburbia.com.au/

2 Which, for instance, turns a blind eye to the closure of the street for the festival and the use of common land for gardening and small-scale infrastructure.

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• Maintains a ‘community assets inventory’ of the sharable skills (electrician,

teacher, knows how to pickle fruit, etc.) and tools (ladder, sewing machine,

trailer) for residents.

• Establishes local food gardens and, in small ways, collectivises the costs of

water use to support these.

• Holds a monthly film and discussion night on the street, open and free to

everyone.

• Organises an annual ‘sustainability fiesta’ for the promotion of community

actions, local produce, arts and crafts, and ‘environmentally friendly’ products

(the vision, as they put it being to ‘educate and inspire’).

• Invests profits from the fiesta into communally owned useful things (a mobile

pizza oven, an olive press).

We can see these interlinked practices as taking place in a cosmopolitical space

that brings together the histories and experiences (for example as manifest in the

skills and knowledge they share) of a culturally and socio-economically diverse

group of people – not all of whom believe in the twin spectres of climate change and

peak oil, but all of whom care about the welfare of their neighbours and the future of

their street. Hulbert Street represents a somewhat under-acknowledged form of

collective action – dependent neither on government funding nor on any ‘shared

vision’, but on the affective and practical elements of good will and communication.

Climate cosmopolitics in practice

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It may seem rather grandiose to talk about these small-scale local actions as

‘cosmopolitical’ – after all, their reach is hardly cosmic. How do these case studies

and practices alter human-nature relations, and actors' intentionality? We believe

that these relationships of local human-nature action in, with and to a climate-

changed city, provide insights into alternative ways of thinking about how planners

and planning systems can engage with the public ecologies of climate-changed

cities.

The stories we have presented highlight, in manifestly present ways, changing

imaginaries and practices in relation to knowledge production, personal and

collective responsibilities, community development and urban living. They bring into

proximity different modes and methods for working across different forms of material

change in cities. Ecoburbia for example speaks of the possibility of collective

commitment and action without collective vision. This is an anathema to the

principles of the New Public Management, but an achievement that may be

necessary in the face of the climate change crisis – globally dispersed, unevenly

harmful and ontologically precarious. Conventional strategic planning, so often

framed in relation to ‘shared’ aims and objectives (MacCallum 2008), can be

paralysed by ongoing disagreement over the nature of such problems, as we have

seen (Innes and Booher 2010). But perhaps climate cosmopolitics can also serve

as a form of memory-work too, where planners, artists, designers, educators,

workers, activists can call upon the radical urban traditions of communal ethos and

enlarge them (Davis 2010, p.42).

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The cases outlined above help to express people’s experience of, and reaction to,

climate change and other crises; they challenge the felt disjunct between actors’

(including actors such as planners, developers, politicians, lobbyists) professional

and personal identities. In doing so they start the process of reconfiguring eco-social

relations, recontextualising climate discourses, and producing new modes of

enactment. As part of the ‘Peoples’ Food Plan, kitchen-table style conversations are

being held locally and nationally in response to the official consultation process.

These include performance and speaking events as well as the active engagement

of social and other media around alternative food visions. In Australian cities such

as Brisbane this is a potentially powerful way of inserting these ideas within

mainstream urban policy and planning processes via grassroots climate movements

that challenge and disrupt mainstream climate politics, thereby rendering them

visible.

For climate change is often difficult to see in an everyday sense, particularly in the

cities of developed countries like Australia. Michael Hulme (2010) observes that the

climate (and natural systems more generally) is now neither natural nor

anthropogenic, but a kind of hybrid (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Zalasiewicz et al.

2010). There can be no certainty as to whether particular weather or extinction

events, for example, have their origins in the human production of carbon emissions.

How, then, do urban citizens know climate change and how do they make climate

manifest (Slocum 2004; Clarke 2010)? One answer to this question comes from

ethnographic and storied explorations of ecology, time and place in the city.

Everyday interactions between people and nonhuman others in urban contexts are

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characterized by affective and corporeal entanglements – where feelings of joy,

despair, hope and vilification play out in daily encounters, and in urban politics and

spaces.

There are few artificial dichotomies here between personal and community

resilience; nor between mitigation and adaptation in relation to crisis. Indeed,

climate change itself does not seem to be generally understood as a separate

object, but as one element (along with local embeddedness in global economic

events, disconnection from nature, perceived corruption of political processes, peak

oil, social isolation, and many other things) contributing to a sense of “not-rightness”

and vulnerability within parts of the community. This absence of reductionist analysis

does not prevent coherent action – quite to the contrary, it enables people to work

together on their general discomfort, without having to commit to particular values

and beliefs (for example, in collective ownership of property, or anthropogenic

climate change) that they do not share.

Conclusion: the possibilities for urban planning

We are at a time when planning’s nature – though not its precise position – as part

of an “ecology of practices” is particularly exposed. The uneasy relationship

between the science and politics of climate change and the mandate of public policy

to connect expertise, community aspirations and strategic decision-making, places

difficult and often contradictory demands on policy makers. At this time, the illusion

of “consensus” in relation to urban development (or, more generally, to practical

23

action in the social/economic/environmental nexus) has well and truly foundered,

leaving a gap in which a range of discourses and practices struggle for power. While

the urgency of the climate change challenge often seems to work against

widespread dialogue at the State level (MacCallum et al. 2011), this lack of

consensus surely provides an opportunity to reimagine conditions for urban

intervention. What possibilities might a cosmopolitical approach, attentive to such

practices as we describe above, suggest for planning theory and practice? A few

points come to mind.

The first point is that urban planning in Australia is in need of a re-enchantment with

an ethics of connection – where temporal and spatial rhythms of seasons, floods,

mosquitoes, bats, food, labour and mobility are integrated into the civic ecological

design of cities. This requires both structural changes to the way in which cities

prioritize privatised forms of economic development over collective “more-than-

human” interests and genuinely common goods. This also means that planners

need to be able to practice experimental politics that work to engage urban-public-

ecological configurations that support the kinds of resilience that are necessary for

the future of the city. Such practices recognise that in the climate-just and

cosmopolitical city the work of pollinators ought to be considered vital to production

of urban space. Our point here is not to collapse different forms of local and global

injustice into a “flat ontology” of human and non-human networks, but rather, to

reorient how the imaginative political work of cities is reconfigured through climate-

related practices that constellate into publically discernable and actionable

phenomena.

24

Mike Davis (2010, p. 45) recently wrote that: “…to raise our imaginations to the

challenge of the Anthropocene, we must be able to envision alternative

configurations of agents, practices and social relations, and this requires in turn, that

we suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to the present.”

Cosmopolitics exposes relations between knowledge, practice and identity,

upsetting the boundaries that we – as urban planners, say – place between different

moments and aspects of our existence. The affective and ideological impulses

behind personal choices – to install solar panels, to attend a street party, to decline

to keep a cat, to grow vegetables, to walk to work, to make our own birthday cards,

to move to a higher density neighbourhood, or not, for example – cannot readily be

untangled from our professional/scientific knowledge of the issues; nor can they be

kept out of our thinking on policy directions. Each of us is a peculiar bundle of

identities, whose decisions about how to live our own lives impinge on those about

how other people should/will live theirs. Seeing professional planning ethics in the

context of an ecology of practices forces us to acknowledge this. In acknowledging

these relationships, we might be better equipped to see the potentialities inherent in

the tensions that they produce.

We believe that the current policy gap between the two imperatives of climate

change response and urban eco-social justice can only be bridged by finding

radically new ways of doing policy and planning. By paying attention to these

alternative stories, we can begin to see how intangible and embodied interactions –

between imagination and knowledge, between human and non-human, between

experience, desire and action – work to shape and sustain city life in a context of

25

environmental crisis. This is the essence of cosmopolitics as action – to change the

social/political/natural world by changing how we live with it.

26

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